


The Monsters Under the Bed

by Leahelisabeth (fortheloveofcamelot)



Series: Twinyards Appreciation Week [21]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Children, Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Ambiguous/Open Ending, First Meetings, Gen, Halloween, Harm to Children, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:16:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27309073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortheloveofcamelot/pseuds/Leahelisabeth
Summary: Nathaniel learned very early on that there were monsters in the world.  Some of them were shadowy figures with guns and knives that appeared and disappeared.  Some of them looked harmless, with smiling faces that concealed lies.  Some of them were supposed to love him and used that to hurt him and frighten him.  Two of them lived under his bed.
Relationships: Aaron Minyard & Andrew Minyard, Neil Josten & Aaron Minyard, Neil Josten & Andrew Minyard
Series: Twinyards Appreciation Week [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/858608
Comments: 6
Kudos: 87
Collections: Twinyards Appreciation Week 2020





	The Monsters Under the Bed

**Author's Note:**

> Written for day 2 of Twinyards Appreciation Week: Halloween.

Nathaniel learned very early on that there were monsters in the world. Some of them were shadowy figures with guns and knives that appeared and disappeared. Some of them looked harmless, with smiling faces that concealed lies. Some of them were supposed to love him and used that to hurt him and frighten him. Two of them lived under his bed.

Nathaniel wasn’t sure exactly when the last two joined him. He knew that when he was four and scrunched up in a tiny ball in the farthest corner under his bed, shaking and crying as his father shouted at his mother, he was all alone with the dust bunnies.

By the time he turned five, there was a darkness, a heaviness in the air, the suggestion of teeth and claws, and he decided the closet was the safer place for him to hide.

When he turned six, he realized there wasn’t just one monster under his bed. He didn’t blame himself for taking so long to realize. One of them liked to grab at his ankles and steal everything he dropped on the floor, later spitting it out stained and dirty and torn. The other stayed mostly silent, hiding in the farthest corner. It didn’t bother with silly pranks, but Nathaniel had to be careful on the rare occasions he managed to smuggle something sweet upstairs. If he left it unattended, he would return to find nothing but crumbs.

When Nathaniel was seven, his father took a hot iron to his shoulder. He lay in bed for days, burning up with fever and trying not to make too much noise. His mother was forbidden from seeing him so the only time he saw a human face was when Lola showed up with food and her rough first aid skills to keep him from dying.

On the second night, he bit his tongue so badly trying to keep from crying that he almost choked on the blood running down his throat. He wondered what Lola would do when she found his body in the morning. Would she tell anyone? Would she leave his body to rot until someone noticed the smell? He didn’t have to ask if he would survive at all; he already knew the answer.

For the first time, one of the monsters under his bed crawled out into the room. He didn’t know how to tell them apart yet. He had only caught glimpses of them out of the corner of his eye. At first glance, it looked like a normal little boy, perhaps a little shorter than he was, with blond hair and dirt smudged across his face. It was only when he looked closer that he could see his eyes were white and pupilless and his mouth was far too wide. When he opened it to speak, his teeth were sharp and pointed and there were far too many of them crammed into his mouth.

“Nathaniel,” he said, putting a chilled hand on his burning forehead. “You’re not allowed to die.”

“Why not?” Nathaniel sobbed. “No one wants me anyway.”

The monster said nothing more, just stood by Nathaniel’s bed, giving the air a wintry chill, and waiting for the fever to subside.

When Nathaniel woke up in the morning, the room was as empty as always. He was still very weak but his fever had broken; he would live.

When he was well enough to return to school, he pretended nothing had happened. He told the lie his father expected, that he had caught the flu going around. He wore a bulky sweater to hide the bandages and the swelling and no one thought to push for more of an explanation.

He scrounged up some change—a nickel here, a quarter there—from the ground and the couch and the washing machine. When he had enough, he bought a box of oreos. He left it on the floor beside his bed when he went to sleep, and in the morning the box was empty and the space under his bed seemed somehow friendlier.

Two weeks later, his father went on a trip and took Lola with him. His mother put on music and baked a tiny batch of cookies, enough for them to have two each. She made hot chocolate and they sat at the table to drink it together. They nibbled slowly on their cookies, savoring a treat they almost never got to have.

Then, the neck of his t-shirt slipped down his shoulder, exposing the scar tissue from the hot iron. She looked sad and made an aborted movement to touch it, to touch him, but instead, she sent him to bed with the last two cookies.

Nathaniel tried to hug her goodnight but she pushed him away. His steps were slow and heavy as he walked upstairs. 

Nathaniel’s father wasn’t going to return for at least another day, so when he reached his room, he put a chair under the handle and pushed one of his thicker sweaters under the door to block any sound. Instead of turning on the overhead light, he switched on his lamp and turned it so most of the room was still in shadow.

“Are you there?” he asked.

There was no answer.

“I brought cookies,” Nathaniel continued, setting the little plate on the floor and sitting cross legged behind it.

“What kind are they?” A voice came from under the bed. It was the first time Nathaniel had heard either of them speak. It was a strange voice, sounding both impossibly young and unfathomably old.

“Chocolate chip,” Nathaniel answered.

The silence in the room thickened and stretched as a darkness billowed out from under the bed, taking the cookies and leaving the plate behind.

Nathaniel shivered but not from fear.

“They’re good,” a different voice said, still strange but slightly more childish sounding. “I’ve never had a warm cookie before.”

“They’re my favourite,” Nathaniel offered. “I don’t get them often either.”

Silence fell again. Nathaniel should go to bed. If he slept in and his father arrived home early, he would be in trouble, but he didn’t want to sleep just yet. “You can come out,” he whispered.

“We’re monsters,” the first voice replied. “This is where monsters belong.”

“You’re not though,” Nathaniel argued. “I’ve met monsters before. You’re nothing like them.”

A little more time passed; Nathaniel was about to give up when two shadows crept out from under the bed and approached. They seemed to stretch and ripple as they came forward, slowly taking on colour and form until there were two little blond boys sitting in front of him, both of them with chocolate chip cookie crumbs smeared around their mouths.

“Why do you look human?” Nathaniel asked.

The two boys exchanged glances with one another before one of them spoke. “We can change shape, a little. But we’ve never been able to look this closely before. Sometimes we get things wrong.”

“Oh,” Nathaniel said. “Do you want to look at me?”

One of them turned on the overhead light, apparently not afraid of the dark after all, while the other crept closer, staring into Neil’s eyes with his white ones. A moment later, something shifted and they were ice blue, like Nathaniel’s, like Nathaniel’s father’s.

“No!” Nathaniel almost shouted before dropping his voice at the last second. “Not that colour.”

“What colour then?” he asked.

Nathaniel thought for a moment. “Brown,” he said. “Brown with bits of gold that catch the lights.” They would be warm like his mother’s instead of cold like his father’s.

The boy focused and his eyes changed. They were closer to gold than brown but Nathaniel liked them.

“What’s your name?” Nathaniel asked.

“We haven’t had names for a long time,” the boy still standing by the light switch said. “It used to be Aaron though.”

“And I used to be Andrew,” the other one said.

Nathaniel nodded.

Aaron came back over and plopped down next to Andrew, so close their shoulders were touching. A moment later, his eyes were the same warm gold colour, although with perhaps a little more green than his brother’s.

“What else have we got wrong?” Andrew asked.

“Um, your teeth,” Nathaniel said before opening his mouth wide to show them.

Black smoke wisped out of their mouths and then they opened them to mirror Nathaniel, showing two sets of teeth that were a perfect copy of his, down to the slightly crooked right front tooth and the little chip on his left eye tooth.

Aaron smiled at Nathaniel while Andrew just stared at him intensely.

“I should go to bed,” Nathaniel said regretfully.

Andrew and Aaron looked at each other and their forms dissolved like smoke, returning to their place beneath the bed.

Nathaniel slept well. It had been a long time since he had felt so safe.


End file.
